George Healy

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In 1996, the Museum of Contemporary Art celebrated the opening of its formidable new building with “Art in Chicago 1945-1995,” an epic survey whose catalog served as the first comprehensive history of Chicago art. Fifteen years later, with the opening of a more modest facility at DePaul University, Chicago art is once again being celebrated, but in a very different way. Rather than attempting to establish a canon of Chicago art, museum director Louise Lincoln has asked forty-one people she happens to know—scholars, colleagues, collectors, art critics and others—to pick a Chicago artist who “is famous, used to be famous, or ought to be famous.” Often, they picked the latter. Read the rest of this entry »

Inside the DePaul Art Museum's inaugural exhibition, "Re: Chicago," with a sculpture by Juan Angel Chavez

By Jason Foumberg

The DePaul Art Museum seems to have risen as quickly as it was realized. Part of a campus-wide flourishing of the arts, including new and forthcoming buildings for the schools of theater and music, the new museum building will open September 17. The galleries were formerly hidden in the university’s library. Now, the museum has a fully accessible public entrance on Fullerton Avenue, directly next to the CTA’s Red Line station. From that station’s platform, people waiting for trains will be addressed by a large video monitor from the museum’s second-floor gallery window, with special projects commissioned by the curators. The first is an interactive video conceived by the design team Plural, who is also responsible for the museum’s new design identity. Read the rest of this entry »

Arturo Garcia-Bustos

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There may be some doubt whether the populist, agrarian, folkloric ideals of the Mexican revolution still apply, a hundred years later, to a modern state on the verge of anarchy. But they have been inspiring many Mexican artists ever since, including Arturo García-Bustos (born 1926) and his wife, Rina Lazo (born 1923), whose prints are now showing  at Chicago’s newest Mexican art gallery, Casa Avilés, located  next to the Park West in Lincoln Park.

No pair of artists could have a better pedigree in twentieth-century Mexican art. Arturo was one of the four “Los Fridos” who studied with Frida Kahlo in her home in historic Coyoacan, while Rina was a studio assistant to Diego Rivera from 1947 until his death ten years later. Indeed, it was through their famous mentors that the couple first met, characteristically, at a political demonstration. Like their mentors, the couple works independently. Arturo tends to be more bombastic, while Rina is more lyrical. Read the rest of this entry »

Robert Blanchon's “Untitled (aroma/1981),” and “Untitled (drawing horse)”

By Jason Foumberg

In 1998, one year before he died at age 33 of AIDS in Chicago, the artist Robert Blanchon created “Untitled (drawing horse),” a replica of the type of benches that students use in a drawing class, but made entirely of glass panes. Blanchon probably enjoyed the fact that, in order to use the bench properly, an artist had to keep their legs spread wide open in front of their art, like a perpetual flirtation. Indeed, sex and the body were the subjects of much of Blanchon’s art, but as “Untitled (drawing horse)” sits today in Golden gallery, on loan from the Blanchon Estate, the glass bench is present like a ghost, its sitter palpably absent.

Here, the drawing horse faces fifty-five ad clippings from gay sex magazines, pinned to a wall. There are not ads for escorts or dates but from companies selling poppers (a sex drug), dick cream, cock rings, a chest-hair wig and other sexual enhancements—even one from the Tom of Finland studio where men could commission portraits. This collection of clippings is another Blanchon artwork, “Untitled (aroma/1981),” from 1995. (The “1981” in the artwork’s title references the year that HIV first started to reveal itself.) In addition to this collection being an archive of back-page gay graphic design and desire in a pre-AIDS era, it is also a dynamic object. Originally, Blanchon photographed and re-printed these clippings, but he did not complete the crucial final step in the hand-developing process, which is to dip the reproductions in a fixative bath. Therefore, the reproductions, once hung in a gallery, are intended to fade and disappear rather quickly and perceptibly during their exhibition. Likely the original magazines would fade anyway, being printed on cheap paper or newsprint, but Blanchon was aiding their demise. Read the rest of this entry »

David Fredenthal, 1935

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When the stock market crashed in 1929, American art detoured off the road to Modernism, and traditional pictorial techniques were used to look at the society that had lost its way. “Who are we?” these realistic images seem to ask, often with the heaviness and dramatic chiaroscuro of earlier ages rather than the lite-bright sunniness of Impressionism. The postwar economic recovery would be announced by the triumph of abstract, individual expression, but in the intervening decades American artists took a look at Americans and how they lived.

The Terra Museum of American Art was once the best place to find special exhibitions of this kind. Now that it’s closed, Yen Azarro of Madron Gallery has done a good job of assembling a museum-quality show, drawing from a variety of galleries and private collections with big national names as well as local artists, like Aaron Bohrod, Edgar Rupprecht and Emil Armin. Read the rest of this entry »

Sadamasa Motonaga

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When progressive young postwar Japanese artists followed their American colleagues into the brave new world of Abstract Expressionist painting, they were only expanding upon a tradition that had been putting expressive shapes, lines, colors and textures on the surfaces of pots for over a thousand years. The Gutai Group, founded in 1954, encouraged experimentation with materials and methods. As their manifesto declares, one member worked a large surface “in a single moment by firing a small, hand-made cannon filled with paint by means of an acetylene gas explosion.” The manifesto turns much more traditional when it declares, “We tried to combine human creative ability with the characteristics of the material in order to concretize the abstract space.” Despite their avant-garde mission of “creating a world that has never been,” the results, at least demonstrated by the two Gutai members in this exhibition, display the precise balance demanded by traditional Japanese aesthetics instead of exposing the self-destructive absurdity of the modern world. Read the rest of this entry »

Sara Kopera, "Some Days Are Blue," 2010

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Of the five young photographers and photo-artists featured at this annual exhibition, Sara Kopera transcends beginner status with her multi-hued, subtly textured, softly focused and muted study, “Beyond Realization,” in which two ambiguous figures occupy the extreme left center within a horizontal gap in a worn and weathered stone façade that runs across the picture plane. Much as we attempt to discern the figures, which appear alternately to be merged into the statue of a man sitting with his back towards us, and objects broken into fragments, we cannot pin down what they represent, which is how Kopera intends to affect us. If Kopera is fascinated by the enigmas of spatial perception, Shana Gordon is drawn to the pathos of time in a critique of progress; her color images capture contemporary places into which she has introduced her hand holding black-and-white photographs of what the sites looked like back in the day. For those attracted to lighter fare, Jen Clar serves up nocturnal color shots of glowing brassieres flying over telephone wires. (Michael Weinstein)

Through September 9 at the DePaul University Art Museum, 2350 North Kenmore

By Jason Foumberg

It’s always pleasurable and edifying to chat with Jim Duignan, the founder of Stockyard Institute, as I find him to be one of the more inspiring people I have come to meet in Chicago’s art world. He is a “connector,” a term famously coined by Malcolm Gladwell in reference to Lois Weisberg, Chicago’s Commissioner of Cultural Affairs. Like Weisberg, Duignan is in possession of a powerful toolkit, concerning not just the visual arts but also music, publishing and radio, which he shares openly with anyone who needs a creative lift. Unlike Weisberg, though, Duignan does not need to navigate the city’s red tape and dwindling funds for art. Instead, his enterprise operates in addition, or as an alternative, to Chicago’s institutional imprimatur. Still, Duignan works with the public, specifically in Chicago’s Back of the Yards and Austin communities. For the next five months, through November, you may connect with Duignan and his team of cultural producers at “Nomadic Studio,” headquartered at the DePaul University Art Museum.

It takes more than just opening a storefront gallery space, and hosting a potluck and Friday night film screening, says Duignan of the various successes and trappings of alternative art events. Often, alternative community art centers have all the charm of a street fair, with the compulsory kids-craft table. But Duignan is after something more enduring. “I want the level of quality to be as high as possible,” he says of the art made by his students. To reach this high level of quality, he enlists experts. Sometimes, even, these experts include the students themselves. On one occasion, he facilitated a workshop where students taught teachers how to use spray paint as a creative medium. Read the rest of this entry »

Robert Lentz, "Sts. Sergius & Bacchus"

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Gay Christians have long had a problem with their church—but not always—as proposed by this exhibition of contemporary Byzantine style icons by Br. Robert Lentz OFM and two of his former students, Lewis Williams SFO and Father William Hart McNichols. Many of the early saints have been venerated as couples for over a thousand years, and there is some evidence that one couple, the martyred Roman officers Sergius and Bacchus, had been joined by the early church in a kind of same-sex union. As with all ancient texts, widely diverse interpretations are possible, but if you want to believe that pre-Medieval Christianity tolerated or even sanctified same-sex union, this is the place to meditate upon more than a dozen highly crafted icons. The overall effect is breathtaking—maybe even stifling—since the pieces seem to have been perfected with obsessive intensity that shares the fervor, if not the otherworldliness, of the school of Photios Kontoglou on Mt. Athos where Brother Lentz once studied. There is such a strong, inward-pulling focus on the expressive eyes, there sometimes seems to be a greater emphasis on self than on the Ad majorem Dei gloriam. Read the rest of this entry »

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As the rest of the world rushes madly off to plastic surgeons or cosmetologists to efface the disfigurements of skin diseases, Lauren Kalman runs in the opposite direction: creating jewelry that simulates pustules and lesions, affixing her handiwork to the skin of female models and then shooting their “embellished” bodies in uncompromising color. It would take a treatise in postmodern cultural theory, which Kalman provides, to explain why she has undertaken her subversive task; suffice it to say that seekers after beauty should look elsewhere and aficionados of the grotesque will experience their eyes’ delight. More faux medical illustrations than fashion shots, Kalman’s images evoke the deeper sense that unwanted eruptions are the pits and cannot be redeemed by art. Turn a pimple into a jewel and it still has the same effect as a zit, which is not Kalman’s purpose (she intends deep play with the culturalized body), yet it is what she has revealed. (Michael Weinstein)

Through May 21 at the International Museum of Surgical Science, 1524 N. Lake Shore Drive